China's manufacturing sector remained in recession territory for the 11th month in a row. The prospects for industry in the eurozone are getting worse. Despite Mitt Romney's gaffe-strewn campaign, America's faltering economy could yet deprive Barack Obama of four more years in the White House.

For policymakers, these echoes of late 2008 are clearly worrying. Back then, the collapse of Lehman Brothers led to a collapse in industrial production and a sharp contraction in world trade. The current slowdown is nowhere near as severe as that suffered in the winter of 2008-09 but is evidence of just how hard it is to shake off the effects of the financial crisis.

There are three big and interlocking problems. The first is Europe, where repeated application of sticking plaster cannot disguise the fact that economic weakness is spreading from the periphery to the core. The second problem is that little progress has been made in tackling the global imbalances that created the conditions for the crash of 2007. China's current account surplus is well down on its pre-crisis peak, but the growing trade tensions between Washington and Beijing are testimony to the slow pace of rebalancing.

Finally, central banks and finance ministries have already used up large amounts of their available ammunition. China has started to ease policy, cutting the cost of borrowing and giving the green light to local infrastructure projects. But the stimulus is not going to be on anything like the scale seen in 2009-10. The US has just announced its third tranche of quantitative easing while the Bank of England appears to be gearing up for a fifth dose of asset purchasing. Public finances in the west are deep in the red.

It is clear what ought to happen. A re-elected president Obama should sit down in the new year with China's new premier, Xi Jinping, and Germany's Angela Merkel to come up with a blueprint for global rebalancing and global reflation. That would involve a revaluation of the yuan and a commitment to stronger domestic demand growth in Germany.

The chances of this happening, though, are slim – even assuming it is Obama rather than the more hawkish Romney sitting in the White House next year. The slowing of the global economy is making policymakers more inward-looking and defensive, with just about every country trying to export its way back to prosperity. Beijing's policy easing should be enough to prevent any further weakening in the economy, and there were signs from Thursday's purchasing managers' index that the manufacturing sector is past the worst. But the world economy looks a long way from returning to sustained, robust growth and the slowdown of 2012 looks set to continue well into 2013.